Transform Your Connectivity with Context-aware SASE Fabric

This is the first blog in a series about Branch Transformation with the Next Gen SASE Branch solution. Built on the Netskope One SASE platform, this innovative approach combines Context-aware SASE Fabric, Zero Trust Hybrid Security, and a SkopeAI-powered Cloud Orchestrator into a unified cloud offering.

This blog delves into Context-aware SASE Fabric, the foundational tenet of the Next Gen SASE Branch solution that facilitates the convergence and sharing of context between networking and security. It leverages the Netskope Zero Trust Engine, providing user, device, and application trust, and creates a transport-agnostic overlay in a single-vendor SASE environment.

Today’s hybrid workforce demands a seamless digital experience from any location—branch, home, or coffee shop. However, existing SASE solutions that are built on outdated SD-WAN and point products still face a number of struggles, such as:

• Legacy SD-WAN crumbles under the weight of exploding cloud apps, expected to reach 72,000 by 2024. Legacy SD-WAN has limited visibility and control of only 2,500 applications. Manually configuring and prioritizing these ever-increasing web, cloud, and SaaS apps to maintain optimal performance poses a significant operational burden. Further, traditional SD-WAN hubs, deployed on-premise, fail to deliver key benefits like active-active links, sub-second failover, and Forward Error Correction (FEC) to cloud applications. 
• With hybrid work models becoming the norm, a whopping 74% of businesses are adopting permanent hybrid work, but are failing to deliver SD-WAN benefits to remote workers, which hampers productivity. This problem becomes even more acute for geographically dispersed branches across continents that struggle to achieve even basic levels of connectivity to headquarters, other branches, and cloud apps, creating a significant barrier to effective collaboration and information flow.
• Multi-cloud adoption is on the rise, with 76% of companies now embracing it.  However legacy SD-WAN struggles to keep up, as advanced routing, extending segmentation, policy consistency, and security to multi-cloud environments pose significant new challenges. The question remains: How do you forklift your on-premise SD-WAN to multi-cloud while struggling with inflexible control planes inhibiting your ability to expand your network?

To navigate these challenges effectively, we need a paradigm shift. Context-aware SASE Fabric prioritizes agility, seamless connectivity, and optimization, all while maintaining peak performance. This revolutionary tool paves the way for branch transformation.

Context-aware SASE Fabric unlocks your network’s potential and transform your branch

Each layer of the Next Gen SASE Branch offers six innovative capabilities. Focusing on the Context-aware SASE Fabric layer, the following six differentiating services enable you to unlock your network’s full potential through network and security convergence, enhanced performance, and a seamless user experience. Here’s how:

1. Context-control meets SD-WAN: Context-aware AppQoE for more than 80k+ Apps: Do you wish your IT team could see and control everything? The Netskope Zero Trust Engine enables full context sharing of user, device, and app trust across Netskope Intelligent SSE & Borderless SD-WAN. This rich context is based on the Cloud Confidence Index (CCI), which reflects enterprise readiness and ranges from 0 to 100. This CCI-based context can be used to create a cloud security policy to block apps with a low CCI score, as they are considered risky applications. Additionally, the Netskope unified SASE gateway in the branch can leverage the same CCI score to make automated QoS decisions, such as not prioritizing apps with low CCI scores. For example, Zoom, a well-known application with a CCI of 82 receives high priority by default, while SureVoIP, a less known application with a lower CCI of 38 gets low priority. The Netskope unified SASE gateway goes beyond simply looking at more than 80,000 apps. It automatically prioritizes them using CCI-based smart QoS defaults. This translates to significant operational benefits for the network operations team. They are freed from manually configuring application priority, allowing them to work more efficiently.
2. Boost performance: High-speed on-ramps with cloud-delivered SASE gateway: Empower your business by integrating multi-tenant unified SASE gateways within the Netskope NewEdge network. This integration enables inbound QoS (from the web to the branch), extends SD-WAN benefits such as active-active links, sub-second failover, and TCP/UDP optimization, and provides high-performance on-ramps to any cloud, SaaS, or UCaaS application.
3. Seamless experience everywhere: Unified SASE with optimized Global WAN connectivity: Integrating the Netskope Borderless SD-WAN natively within AWS and Azure, allows customers to deliver Global WAN services independently. Netskope Global WAN enables customers to establish low-latency, highly optimized connections from transcontinental branches to headquarters and to other branches. 
4. Multi-cloud networking simplified: Seamless connectivity and security: Unify your multi-cloud environment. Netskope connects major clouds using cloud-native constructs, enabling direct, secure overlays for seamless “App-to-App” communication. Additionally, Netskope Intelligent SSE integrates with a single click, securing “App-to-Internet” communication with automated policy-based steering.
5. Cloud-native SDN: 100% SaaS controller and advanced routing: Imagine a cloud-scale SDN controller, the brains of the operation for your remote user, branch, on-premise, and cloud-delivered environments, supporting standard protocols like eBGP/iBGP, OSPF, and static routing. It provides advanced controls such as route filtering, routing automation, and true separation of control and data planes, facilitating a modular and highly scalable architecture.
6. Network segmentation reimagined: Secure end-to-end segmentation at scale

Network architects crave robust security to enable diverse use cases such as threat isolation/containment, compliance, and mergers and acquisitions. Netskope extends VRF-aware segmentation across the enterprise footprint, including branches, data centers, and multiple clouds, allowing architects to craft segment-aware policies, topologies, AppQoE and firewall rules, enabling granular controls.

Unlock network efficiency with Context-aware SASE Fabric

Context-aware SASE Fabric, a foundational component of the Next Gen SASE Branch solution, modernizes connectivity through high-performance convergence and sharing of context between Borderless SD-WAN and Netskope Intelligent SSE. The Netskope Zero Trust Engine ensures continuous adaptive trust-based policy controls extend effortlessly and consistently across secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero trust network access (ZTNA), cloud firewall (FWaaS), and software defined WAN (SD-WAN) services, leaving no security gaps and delivering an exceptional user experience.

This concludes our exploration of Context-Aware SASE Fabric and its role within the broader Next Gen SASE Branch solution. 

In our next blog, we’ll shift gears and explore the security layer of the Next Gen SASE Branch solution: Zero Trust Hybrid Security. we’ll delve deeper into how its core capabilities deliver an integrated on-premise and cloud-delivered security for complete protection everywhere.

To learn more about Branch Transformation with the Next Gen SASE Branch, please watch this webinar